In September I wrote about how the Bush administration’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster was incompetent. Now, it appears it may have been criminal. This morning Americans woke up to this front-page story in the New York Times:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
(…)"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president’s chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don’t you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."
One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.
A quick response from the White House would have saved hundreds of lives. Under a normal system of accountability one could expect jail time for the principals involved. Meanwhile, President Bush, in a PR stunt, attempted to deflect attention from the Katrina investigation wtih a fantastic tale of how his anti-terror team had thwarted an attack on Los Angeles by terrorists who planned to hijack airplanes "using shoe bombs". Aside from the fact that it defies logic that an airplane could be hijacked by a shoe bomb, it appears that Bush may have "grossly exaggerated" the threat.
But several U.S. intelligence officials played down the relative importance of the alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush’s speech to politics. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize the White House, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk.
One intelligence official said nothing has changed to precipitate the release of more information on the case. The official attributed the move to the administration’s desire to justify its efforts in the face of criticism of the domestic surveillance program, which has no connection to the incident.
